How to Leverage Scoring in CRM – Action Items for Sales, Marketing and Customer Service Teams

The concept of assigning a Score to an individual Contact, Lead, or Account in CRM is not new, but it is seldom used to its full potential.

Scoring is designed to give an indication of the engagement level of the members of your target audience. That can include prospects or current clients. Once you have your marketing automation platform and your CRM connected, what you do with the Scoring information will vary based on both your role in your organization and your goals as an organization.

What Makes up a Score?

Typically, a Score is made up of a set of values assigned to the actions and Activities associated with a particular Contact or Lead in your CRM. Many companies are now adopting Account-based strategies, where scores can be aggregated and averaged across all Contacts within a given Account. Examples of Activities can include email opens and clicks, web page visits, form fills, survey responses and landing page visits. Each action is assigned a point value and then aggregated over a given time frame. That time frame could be forever, or more likely it is either a long-term Score (365 days) or a short-term score (30 to 90 days).

How Marketing Can Leverage Scoring in CRM

Your Marketing team will use Scoring to customize their efforts. For example, one tactic would be to target the most engaged prospect with more aggressive outreach to set appointments for the Sales team. Another tactic would be to study the least engaged prospects and determine their common characteristics. You may discover that your targeting is off and that you should redistribute your budget to target more prospect like those in the highly engaged group.

How Sales Can Leverage Scoring in CRM

You Sales team will be looking at Scoring on an individual Contact level. On a daily or weekly basis, an individual sales rep might pull a list of all their prospects and sort that by Score, highest to lowest, to understand who the hottest prospects are and plan their activities around that. In addition, in the same way the Marketing reviews scores based on the lowest level of engagement, Sales could use this information to study the least active prospects and look for commonalities and develop different tactics to connect with them.

How Customer Service Can Leverage Scoring in CRM

Understanding the engagement level of current customers can also help guide communication and outreach. Scoring for Customer service can help identify a drop in engagement, which might represent a client flight risk. By reviewing changes in activity, actions like direct outreach to a customer can be triggered to help mitigate issues and retain clients. On the converse side, highly engaged customers are likely candidates for outreach to request reviews and referrals.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to maximizing the value of Scoring. If you are not leveraging this powerful marketing data, it would be in your best interest to take a close look at it. As you do, consider that one of the keys to successful use of Scoring is easy access to data on both an individual Contact level, and on an aggregate level. Great tools for creating your lists are a must, and we have a pretty good idea of where you can find them.

If you have questions, or would like to learn more about how you can leverage Scoring, reach out to us at [email protected].